For your company to meet the changing demands of its customers, as well as keep up with developments in the market, you need a digital transformation strategy.
Incorporating digital technologies into your business means you’ll be able to streamline operations, cut costs, and improve the way you communicate. Now, no strategy is perfect, and you’ll likely have to make adjustments as you go along, but neglecting to implement one can leave you trailing behind the competition.
There are four key types of digital transformation solutions: domain, cultural/organizational, business model, and business process. Keep reading to learn more about them and why you should implement them.
A Closer Look At The Types Of Digital Transformation
Domain: A company that isn’t available online is looking to get left behind. Creating a website is key to communicating with customers and promoting services in a world where most companies are hired online.
Cultural/Organizational: To digitally transform any area of your business, failing to properly communicate this with your team can cause delays and render it less effective. It’s important that your staff members are in the loop.
Business Model: How a company or its product is structured is a key area for transformation. One example of this could be a catering company that wants to adopt technologies in order to begin providing its services locally through food delivery apps.
Business Process: This type of transformation is focused on swapping out old goals for new ones. It might also involve the way in which a company sets about achieving its goals, whether it’s to cut costs or improve customer retention.
Why You Need Digital Transformation
Focus On The Bigger Picture
The chance to automate certain processes allows departments to make more valuable use of their time. Think about your finance department – applying the use of accounting software instead of manually processing all salary data reduces the potential for mistakes and reduces workloads.
HR is just one other area that’ll benefit from digital transformation. Leveraging technologies in this department means they can focus more on the wellbeing of your employees; they can respond more quickly to the concerns of employees and shorten the time it takes to reach resolutions. Plus, certain technologies will enable staff to communicate with HR digitally and have a place to track the progress of their claims.
Reach Younger Consumers
Younger consumers are less likely to rely on old methodology for purchasing products or services. They’ve spent most of their lives surrounded by new technologies, after all. Digital transformation in insurance, for example, means an industry that has the hard work of appealing to the younger generation can turn to modern tactics in order to do so. Creating an app, using social media marketing, and the creative use of video are a few examples of this.
Releasing purpose-built products that take into consideration what young consumers actually want as well as the financial obligations and goals they have should be a large part of your digital transformation strategy.
Strengthen Security
A large part of the world is remote working, and will likely continue to do so even after once the COVID-19 fallout has dispersed. The need for strong data security is key. There’s no point in relying on staff to access shared drives from protected connections, or to avoid public Wi-Fi zones, is pointless. Not employing a zero-trust framework, with multi-factor authentication, and a VPN to minimize vulnerability can leave your network wide open to data breaches.
A few other essential technologies for protecting security include anti-phishing protocols, password managers, and antiviruses.
Improve Relationships With Other Businesses
Many businesses rely on sub-contractors, suppliers, and distributors to operate. The old way of communicating with each other is outdated and slow, but using technologies to redesign this form of ordering, working, and communicating means speeding the processes up and keeping up with the already fierce competition.
The sooner these technologies can be implemented, the sooner you’re able to streamline existing partnerships. You’ll also become more flexible and approachable to other businesses which, in turn, will be perfect as your operations begin to scale up. Plus, there’ll be no stress added to your already busy IT department since the responsibilities of these technologies will fall to other departments.
Better Data Collection
If like most businesses you’re collecting swathes of data on your customers, you’ll need the software to track and analyze it. Proper use of this information can help move your operations forward. You can turn simple data into actionable intelligence, improving customer experiences, your departments, products, and more.
Being able to understand your data better also means cutting costs. Better management of your resources means you’re able to take a more educated approach to inventory orders that means no more wasted stock or letting customers down due to a lack thereof.
